Stuart Kaminsky - Blood On The Sun

She wasn't going to talk about that with George Melvoy.

The clock in the window of the coffee shop across the street read 2:37 a.m.

Kyle Shelton sat in the window, glancing at the clock and the few people of the night who passed by the night-lit interiors of the shops. There was a young laughing couple, arm in arm. He thought of Becky and closed his eyes. There was a trio of young men whispering, emitting danger. Kyle could sense it.

The air conditioner in the window next to the one before which he was sitting rattled and gave off spurts of almost cool air. The night heat seeped through the windows, the walls.

He had gone through cycles about his plan. Sometimes he thought that for something improvised, it was reasonably good. Things could go wrong, but it should hold. At other times, he was certain it had been a terrible plan, that the CSI cop Taylor was gathering pinpricks of evidence, secrets of blood and DNA, fingerprints he had forgotten.

His friend Scott Shuman said Kyle could crash at his apartment for a few nights. Scott was a good guy who was taking a big chance harboring a fugitive. Kyle had known Scott- short, dark unkempt curly black hair, slightly pudgy- in college. Both had been philosophy majors. They had become friends. Scott had become a well-paid computer program designer for an Indian company that explored the universe. Scott had never married. Though they never discussed it, Kyle thought his friend was probably gay but hadn't yet admitted it to himself. Kyle could be wrong. He had been wrong about many things.

Middle of the night. Kyle felt it coming. He was going to allow himself to grieve. Actually, he had no choice. He could feel it happening.

Kyle could not remember crying as he was about to do, shaking with grief and loss, considering that there might really be a malevolent force that lived and thrived on the pain of humans. He wept and remembered Ovid's words: "Suppressed grief suffocates. It rages within the breast and is forced to multiply its strength."

The clock in the coffeehouse window read 2:49 a.m.

Mac's watch read 2:49 a.m. He was walking Rufus to the small dog park five blocks from his apartment. He should have returned the dog before coming home. Mac had long ago admitted that his one emotional weakness was dogs. He knew how to handle them, work with them, admire them. He also knew he did not want to own one in the city, not with his job.

There was another single figure, a man, in the dog park. He sat across from Mac on a wooden bench and watched his short-legged pug waddle around the grass and dirt. The man, in his forties or fifties, looked tired. His arms were draped over the bench and he eyed Mac and Rufus warily. This was Manhattan, the middle of the night.

Rufus and the pug walked slowly up to each other, sniffed and then stepped away to take care of their own business.

Then Rufus moved to the man on the bench, sniffed and hurried back to Mac, who reached down, petted him and whispered, "I know."

The man on the other bench was carrying something that Rufus had been taught to detect and report. It could be drugs or a gun. In spite of the heat that had bled into the night, Mac wore a light jacket under which were his holster and gun.

He had decided that the man with the pug was almost certainly not a threat. He was a man with a dog.

Mac thought about his wife, Claire, again. His thoughts of grief were not that different from those of Kyle Shelton, though he didn't put them in the words of a philosopher.

A hot night like this back in Chicago, coming back from the wedding of Claire's cousin. Too much to drink but happy, comforted by her closeness. They had walked instead of going home, talked instead of sleeping, made plans instead of accepting the need for sleep. It had been a good night. There had been many of them. Not enough of them.

Mac got up. The man on the bench watched him leave, his pug rubbing against his leg.

In a few hours, he would find Kyle Shelton. In a few hours he would talk to Jacob Vorhees again. In a few hours the investigation of the murder of the Vorhees family would be over, but it would not be the end of the horror for the boy and the young man who liked to quote philosophers.

Mac looked at his watch: 3:20 a.m.

It was 3:20 a.m.

Sak Pyon looked at the illuminated dial of the clock on the bedside table. He carefully peeled back the sheet, sat up slowly and got out of bed, moving softly across the floor toward the bathroom. He did not want to disturb his sleeping wife.

Nothing like this had happened in at least five years, maybe more. He slept without an alarm clock and woke automatically at 4:15 a.m. every day. He got washed, brushed his teeth and hair, dressed and left the apartment without making a sound. He would pick up coffee and a fresh blueberry muffin before he got to the shop.

Because he was early and because he had much to think about, Pyon decided to walk to work. The young policeman would probably be back about the sketch Pyon had drawn, a sketch not of the man who had gone through his shop and almost certainly killed the strange Jewish boy next door. Only last night before he had fallen asleep did he realize that he had drawn a stand-up comedian from one of the television shows he had seen on the Comedy Network. The policeman would almost certainly be back.

Pyon kept walking, the day already pre-dawn muggy. In Korea, the summer heat had not bothered him, but a quarter of a century in New York had changed him.

He thought of the man he should have sketched, should have told the policeman about, but Pyon had remembered the moment when the other man had entered the store and moved to the counter and leaned over, invading Pyon's space, eyes unblinking as he quietly said, "I have your home address and the home address in Hartford of your daughter. Your granddaughter's name is Anna. She's five."

Pyon nodded, afraid that he understood what he was being told.

"I have not been here today," the man said. "If you tell anyone, the police, your wife, your daughter, anyone, I will kill your family. Do you believe me?"

Pyon believed the man, who hovered over him with a look much like that of the militia officer who had killed Pyon's father with a single shot to the head, killed him calmly in front of the family. Pyon believed this man.

And so he had lied to the policeman and made a sketch of a television actor whose name he did not know. Pyon, as he approached the shop on the still-darkened street, gave serious consideration to quietly selling the shop to one of the several people who had shown interest. He could sell the shop, pack and… no. The man would find him. He would certainly know where to find Pyon's daughter, Tina, who lived in Hartford with her husband and Pyon's granddaughter. The man would find them. Of this he was sure.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the threat delivered by the man, thought Pyon, was the fact that it had been delivered in almost perfect Korean.

He looked at his watch as he turned on the light. It was almost 5:30 a.m. Through the window he could see the coming dawn over the buildings across the street.

At 5:30 a.m., Aiden Burn's radio came on with the news on the half hour. She got up. She was meeting Hawkes at 6:30 a.m. He had left a voice message on her cell phone saying he had reexamined the bodies of the two dead men and had returned to the crime scenes. He had found something interesting.

Stella and Flack would be wearing down Joshua again this morning, but she wasn't sure about him. Evidence led both toward and away from Arvin Bloom. Her report had laid out the pros and cons. Her report did not include her gut feeling.

She was dressed, showered and through the door by six a.m.